Olympic Readership

So Team GB won 29 golds. But the national press and the BBC will see the Olympics as an unqualified success too.

The Lightening Bolt’s 100m final victory attracted 19 million viewers to BBC One on Sunday 5th August and Mo’s fantastic 10,000m win had a peak audience of 15.3 million viewers. Not great news for tv advertisers of course! However Channel 4s coverage of the paralympics has already attracted 10million for the opening ceremony.

The press meanwhile have shown how their audiences can increase dramatically for big national events. Research carried out by YouGov found that national newspaper content was consumed by 78% of all adults or 32.8million.

Traditionally national newspapers increase circulations and readership for major events. But this time the talk has been of a “social media games” and undoubtedly social has been prominent. However the research showed that for Olympic news national newspaper websites (not including print) were used by 29% of adults, Twitter 15%, Facebook 25% and YouTube 12%.